By this reasoning, there is no central authority in the dollar system since anyone could become chair of the federal reserve. The odds for an individual without specific hardware to actually mine (and then becoming a validator) a single block are extremely thin. (Granted it's more likely than becoming the chair of the Fed, but less likely than becoming the head of the central bank of Malta for a citizen of that country …)
You are confusing a validator with a miner. While most miners are validators, not all validators are miners, in fact the overwhelmingly vast majority of validators are not miners.
Being a Bitcoin validator requires nothing particularly powerful in terms of hardware. A cell phone won't cut it, but a 10 year old laptop is enough to be a validator.
That's a theoretical difference, but in practice nothing will happen if your laptop consider a transaction as invalid. The only non-miner validators that count are exchanges, and those are almost as concentrated as miners. If miners are mining an invalid chain, and big exchanges are accepting it, your individual “validation” has no more value than when protesting against the Fed about how they should not do QE.
The only “validation” in the bitcoin protocol occurs at mining time (and ironically enough, it's not even mandatory so invalid blocks have been mined by Antpool before), everything else is just social convention (and assume that laypeople can have access to an untampered bitcoin executable: what if Google Chrome, or Windows, or whatever software running on the same machine replaced it with an alternative binary on behalf of the NSA?).
As a side note, Bitcoin, like all p2p protocols, is extremely brittle if run only by benevolent individuals. It's only secure because it's more of a federated ecosystem of players with pockets deep enough and a relational network between one another to cooperate.
For bitcoin, this federated network is fairly adversarial, and nobody ever managed to get a dangerous leadership on it. But if you look at Ethereum, you'll see a very hierarchical social structure, where Vitalik & Al. have almost complete power over the so called “distributed” network. (rolling back transactions, or completely changing the protocol at the expense of the miners with their move to proof of stake).
You're rewriting history here (ironic, in a discussion on blockchains, isn't it). It was “likely”[1] to happen in the long run. And the change wasn't part of the protocol itself, its development and schedule where done behind close doors in a centralized way. And it's not even the biggest example of centralized decision to override what the protocol guaranteed: after the DAO “hack”, they tampered with the blockchain and said “do as if the hack never happened”, no central banker in the world has such a power, even in China.
If you aren't able to tell the difference between “the goal is X” and “it's likely we do X in the end for security reasons” then there's not much point to have a conversation.
You are being pedantic. Your argument is that the authors of that document can predict the future and only make definitive statements. You're effectively basing your entire argument over a single word. The intention was clear or they wouldn't have mentioned it at all.
Ok, you win! Nobody knew PoS was coming! What a great surprise! /s :facepalm:
By this reasoning, there is no central authority in the dollar system since anyone could become chair of the federal reserve. The odds for an individual without specific hardware to actually mine (and then becoming a validator) a single block are extremely thin. (Granted it's more likely than becoming the chair of the Fed, but less likely than becoming the head of the central bank of Malta for a citizen of that country …)